


Leaves:An Album of Sketches

by peoriapeoria



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Art, F/M, Gen, Loss, M/M, Reflection, drabblenahalf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-06
Updated: 2012-10-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 16:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/505349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peoriapeoria/pseuds/peoriapeoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Each 'chapter' is one hundred fifty words, that is to say, they are a drabble and a half*.</p>
<p>Because of the nature of the canon as relates to Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and World War Two there is loss, death, and trauma to the extent that I'm not using the Archive warnings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Tony looks at the sketchbook, confused, picture after picture of hands. Backs of hands mostly, the same hands, over and over. Steve is a good artist, his lines are clean.

Suddenly Tony gets it, these are Steve's hands, his scarred hands before Project:Rebirth. He pours over them. He takes his own scars for granted.

Steve is unflawed, his bruises fade fast, he can't keep a callus, he'd blister if the serum didn't keep ahead of the damage. Which is the point, the serum keeps erasing Steve's marks. Outside.

Inside. Tony tries to remember how recently Steve was soaking in W.W.II, wondering when the next of his men would pay the ultimate price. How recently he was remade. How recently he'd found he'd lost everything and been saved.

If Steve slowed down, would it all tear through him? If he doesn't, won't it tear through him too? Devil, deep sea.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve had thought about coming home, Prior. After, there wasn't time. He could lie, to himself. War was about waiting, about too much time until too few minutes, not enough seconds remained.

Now he was in New York, and it's not just the absence of Bucky that makes him a stranger. Buildings that were newly finished when he'd started trying to enlist had aged, or been replaced. So many torn down.

He wouldn't have been able to come home, even if Bucky had made it. Visit, maybe. Have an egg cream. He'd been naive to think that the war would end for him, that Captain America would take off the uniform and get a job.

He'd wanted to be fussed over by people that remembered him as he'd been. Seventy years was a lifetime. People lived longer now, but not long enough for those then older than he is now.


	3. Chapter 3

Natasha looked around Steve's guestroom. Stark extended his own rules to his friends, nevermind the security nightmare of any of them having 'guests'. So many faces. He'd drawn his lost world. She had no doubt that these were the right waitresses, actual pushcarts, that each clothesline pulley was accurate. Unlike a photo, they captured the sum of moments rather than a single incident. The possible were arranged to their most evocative.

There were those she'd thought were abstracts until Impressionist came to her mind. These had the swell of horses studding traffic, the light hazy, the contrasts low. Loud, smelly, exciting, dangerous. Families standing with their meager evicted possessions while deliveries went on. Not pathos, strength, men's backs, women's will, small children scrambling, playing, growing.

"You should have a show." Steve's expression. It wasn't that he didn't believe they were good. "They're windows, they should have people looking through them."


	4. Chapter 4

He likes that he can run outside, not just in alleys. That's a change. Sometimes he runs in the parks, one of many getting exercise. Other times he runs where there aren't many, mornings strangely quiet. It doesn't take as many men to unload ships, the trucks are so much bigger. He sees women doing jobs, operating forklifts, cranes, cement mixers, that he knows their mothers (grandmothers, greatgreataunts) did during the war only to be sent 'home' when men came back.

Women's work had been hard, dangerous. Out of view. People have odd ideas of his time. He sees the surprise when he isn't a bigot; he's glad that SHIELD had thought to compile a glossary because there were words used then politely (not fake politely, though there were those too) that have been supplanted in usage by what had been fighting words. Words also with added meanings. 

Gay. Queer.


	5. Chapter 5

Howard kept looking for Steve. He knew that if there was a body, Steve was alive. Looking cost a lot; not in treasure, not just treasure, but that cost meant little to Stark Industries. 

No, it cost him hope, yet again dashed. It didn't stop the next expedition, and the next. He would keep looking. It also made him face what he was doing, what he had done. He had married and had a son.

He wasn't cut out to be a father. Tony was so smart, except for looking to his father for recognition. He kept doing it. Stubborn might be hereditary.

He's kept looking for Steve, knowing that he's not the man he was, that the world-- If there was a body, Steve was alive. Howard can't give up, can't be a better man. So many breakthroughs have stemmed from these expeditions.

Howard's love has always been self-destructive.


	6. Chapter 6

Dear Steve,

I know that you will be found, Howard will not stop looking until success. We have won the war, but you will have to judge at what cost we've bought the peace. That is something I admired about you, that while you were practical, you weren't pragmatic. Too bad that cannot be bottled.

I am sorry that I won't have the opportunity to make our date. Please do learn to dance, I wish you every happiness. Perhaps this world needs time to be worthy of you; that, or you're going to be found just as we really need you. If the later, I'm sorry and know your best is a gift thrown before the deserving and the otherwise.

Fondly,

Peggy nee Carter

She set her pen down, checking her hands for stray ink. Habit. She checked her make-up in the mirror. She folded the letter. Her groom awaited.


	7. Chapter 7

He had thought basic research would aid finding treatment for his condition. It hadn't. The Serum hadn't worked on Steve the way it had been thought. The healing, that might have further application, but Project: Rebirth was more apt a name than could have been considered.

The Steve that stepped out should have been the Steve that grew up. His parents, and likely their parents, and their parents before them had been marked by dearth and the disease dearth tows in its wake. Steve likely would have been somewhere in between his current physique and his Dickensian Before had he'd not been born so soon after the Influenza Pandemic, if poverty hadn't segued into the Great Depression.

The healing had permitted Steve to survive being reborn, being unraveled and knit back 'optimally'. He wasn't rewritten, he was reread, his DNA made flesh without stutters, skips, pops.

It wasn't Bruce's answer.


	8. Chapter 8

Captain, oh Captain. Steve was learning to kiss him and Tony was all for hands on education. Loved to serve. So much Steve to touch. No, Steve was pulling away, Tony tried to resist but not in the suit, no contest.

"I shouldn't have done that."

Beard burn, kiss swollen lips. Tony watched Steve heal. He did the math, oh it was sexy, sexy equations. "I don't mind." He moved back against hunka hunka burning love, no not a Capsicle At All.

Steve evaded. He radiated... frustration?

"Steve, talk to me. I know Morse code." He pulled the soft hand to him, rubbed the phantom drawing callus. Erased. What other body parts could Steve sketch from memory?

"Stop it, Tony."

Steve didn't pull his hand free, as he parted them. Tony could follow a blueprint. He could reach back through time. "I'm glad you did." He kissed Steve, who responded.


	9. Chapter 9

Steve's apartment encapsulated everything that had changed. His floor in Tony's tower. Howard had been wealthy, but then Steve hadn't even had the same back as before so it didn't matter his shirts were little more than rags. That most everything he had the government had given him, sinew included. He had a floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan. He'd worked out the sight-lines, he'd have been able to see the tower from every place he'd called home, if only distance and not time separated then and now.

He'd found out what had happened to his Commandos, and perhaps it was a bit creepy but he'd done much the same for everyone else he'd known. Microfiche, obituaries, church records. For him, he'd lost everyone suddenly, and he had to remember his grief was out of place. Some of his men survived the war.

There were weddings, births, graduations, more weddings, births, graduations, whether in that order or not. Life. They had gone on, and he had this future in which to live. He had a team, he had a fight, and he was making it up as he went. Not much different, except in every detail.

He'd been if not afraid something akin when he'd opened the door. He'd left after the cleanup, because he couldn't take the ruins of his New York, intact buildings like gravestones. He'd only seen America from a USO tour and that was a shame.

He went and looked. It was humbling and he was mostly proud, when he wasn't pissed off. There were things he'd have thought if he'd ever considered it that in seventy years people would have outgrown. A few surprising new ways to be an ass; if they were new, he'd been a bit sheltered as a child. Yes, he had.

Loss wasn't new to him, and he had to remember that what had been for him been a moment, had been a plane plowing down, had been lifetimes, full of good and bad memories. His friends and acquaintances had lived. Some longer than others, that was the cost of war as much as life. He hoped that in the main they'd been happy.

Howard hadn't. Steve had kissed proof of that overwhelming fact. The serum meant he couldn't still feel it. That was worse than he couldn't get drunk; physically he healed fast enough morphine wasn't a real loss. He'd learned to set his bones as he went.

Tony. Howard had been wrong, so achingly, stupidly, Wrong. He hadn't been Stark's greatest achievement, and that was Tony's doing in spite of Howard. Why couldn't Howard have been a better man? Why had he not been a better father? He should have had every advantage and he'd squandered them time and again.

Steve stepped into his kitchen. Mostly he cooked in the common kitchen. His stove was a marvel, the burners exactly as big as whatever pot or pan he set on it. He filled a kettle from the gleaming tap. His kitchen was beautiful as a sculpture. It hadn't registered immediately, when he'd returned and been handed a keycard, that it wasn't a sculpture.

He'd woken to a set, a fake hospital, a fake 40s. He'd braced himself as he slid the card and the door slid open. It had taken his breath away. Here was a future moored, not the floating sham, the unrealized promise. He'd looked it over carefully, stepped into the pink bedroom with its spare bed lit from below, peeked into a bathroom with pennytiles and barely seamed walls. This was the future he'd been promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This time I needed four to make a chapter.


	10. Chapter 10

"She taught me to ride a motorcycle." Steve looked out over the city.

Tony held his tongue. He smiled wanly when Steve turned. "She was going to teach me to dance."

Tony expressed volumes without a word. Steve turned away.

"Peggy wrote me a letter." 

He couldn't breathe. "Did you kiss her?" Tony inhaled when Steve nodded. Good. "So--"

"I'm sorry I've been avoiding you." They'd assembled, Captain America and Ironman, but Steve had avoided Tony.

"It's not easy looking this good. Or it's good looking this easy, I forget."

"Don't."

"JARVIS, something popular 1942, fox-trot." He grinned at Steve. "I had lessons." He claimed Steve's hands, pulled him into stance. "How'd an entire kickline of chorus girls not teach you to dance?"

"Jealousy."

Tony smirked. "No mutinies?" He wondered how far that blush ran. Steve wasn't talking.

"Peggy wouldn't have just hit the shield. She told me it worked."


	11. Chapter 11

"May I have this dance?" Tony was ten. Aunt Peggy smiled, gave him her hand. She was even taller than the girls from lessons. She was nice.

"You're a very good dancer."

Tony smiled. He'd get taller and girls would start saying things like that. Peggy was prettier than them anyway. "I'm building a robot."

"What kind of robot?"

He told her about its treads, and its arm. He was still working on its sensors. "I have to control it remotely, but I took it off the cable last week."

"What is it for?"

"Dangerous places." He thought a moment. "Or to help people." He should make it more like a dog, it needed to learn. He guided Peggy around the dance-floor. She wouldn't interrupt him while he was creating. Tony thought about how he avoided other dancers, about motion parameters.

He left for his lab when some man cut-in.


	12. Chapter 12

Tony was drunk. He'd ordered JARVIS into full Tony lockdown before he'd started. Normally Tony drank like a fish; well, had drank like a fish, he didn't like missing muster and since it could happen at any time--he'd go nuts if they didn't let him fight when he'd had one or two.

He wasn't even playing, he was drunk, drunk for Tony. This drunk would kill lesser men. Pursuing Steve was suicidal, not reckless, ill-advised or any of the usual boilerplate, he did that shit unthinking. 

Steve shouldn't be settling for him. Not that he was, Steve was slipperier than an eel and that was soo hot but no Steve was totally Capsicle when he slip-slided. He kept coming back, so Tony felt guilty and honored. Suicidal. Wasn't like Russian roulette, more like Schrödinger's cat, fucked or not he was dead.

Steve was naive not stupid. Tony loved him.


	13. Chapter 13

Clint had joked about Mom and Dad fighting. Their Captain was a kid and Tony acted worse than one until he didn't; not one nanosecond or micrometer too late. He'd go past the gates of hell and come back out sound between the two. Plans and toys, big, bad and bold.

He wondered when this had happened and then he realized it hadn't. That was what broke his brain, the futile avoidance of that better accomplished, by two of the bravest idiots he'd ever known.

He decided pestering Bruce was the sensible thing. Natasha would just look at him, pityingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this one is a drabble itself.


	14. Chapter 14

"Did you misplace the X-axis in your saddle-shaped space?"

Tony checked he wasn't drooling. "What?"

"You are the dumbest man I know." Steve kissed him.

"Should look in a mirror."

Steve bobbled, it was totally cute. "You're still dumber." He started taking off his clothes.

"Don't." Tony didn't trust that Steve wasn't laying down on the wire.

"Talk to me." Steve took the silence before it was deafening. "I've been forgetting there is no 'try'. I can't fix the past. You can't fix the future. Now is all we have, one now after another." He wrapped his arms around Tony. "I could call a press conference."

"You wouldn't." Tony didn't know that. Steve could surprise him. Most people couldn't, Tony was too cynical. "You're crazy."

"I brought back four hundred men wearing a borrowed helmet."

"JARVIS, no recordings. See, I'm crazy too."

"Override that, JARVIS. Encrypt."

"Steve."

"I love you."


	15. Chapter 15

_Please hold onto the enclosed letter until the end of the war. You know who it's for if I don't collect it myself._

She had received the letter years ago, James Barnes apparently using his prankster ways in a more serious vein. Steve Rogers never came for his letter, nor did Bucky. The notices she received, those are part of the orphanage's papers. This...

Steve clearly was involved in important matters, for a colonel to write his letter. For it to be the same colonel that wrote Bucky's. Now, decades later she puts his name on a manila envelope and slips message and instructions in.

She feels that too much history is about battles won and lost, for isn't each both, and too little about those that make the difference, who pay the sacrifice. The world kept making bullies. Might God grant them more Steves and their canted guardian angels.


	16. Chapter 16

Steve was going to be the death of him and what a way to go. Two rounds in and Tony was impressed. Steve's refractory period had to be serum-enhanced. How was he the one who got to go down on the human pinnacle of perfection? Which, totally true, Steve's soldier was super.

Steve shifted, pulling Tony to him. Wow, really. Wow.

"Fuck me." He smiled as Steve blinked, moaned and arched as dirty kisses smattered his lips and face. Tony put a hand between them.

"Steve. Inside me." It shouldn't be possible for anyone to be that surprised, or for Steve to be that adorable.

Someone had been doing his homework, and that thought was so wickedly hot Tony ran Kelvin equations. Lube, fingers, extra credit answers, yes yes yes.

Tony straddled Steve, hand framed by Steve's pecs, and sank. Real, so slow, not his plan. Steve undulated.

"Love you."


End file.
